The Libertines and me: Carl Barat's big sister tells her story at the Edinburgh Fringe
For years Lucie Barât lived in the shadow of her famous brother. Now she’s the headline act as she shares her story in a new theatre show
Lucie Barât grew up on a council estate in Basingstoke. She also grew up in New Age traveller camps and communes. The duality of her upbringing led on to a plurality of professions - acting, writing, performance poetry, publishing, singing - for this self-declared “artistic Del Boy”.
But if you think the name sounds vaguely familiar it is likely that you are thinking of her younger brother Carl, co-frontman of The Libertines, one of the most ardently adored bands of the 21st century. Thanks to his notoriety, Lucie’s best known role in adulthood has been as “Carl Barât’s sister”. And yet…. “I was the golden girl who won this scholarship to drama school,” says Barât the elder, “and he was the black sheep getting into trouble.”
It’s such a germane summation of affairs that she has used the line in her new autobiographical show, Standing in the Shadows of Giants, in which she gets to grips with her helter skelter existence, both personal and career-wise, her addictions, her sexuality, her experiences of misogyny in the arts and especially her siblings-on-steroids relationship with Carl.
“We ended up living together just after I graduated drama school,” she recalls. “He dropped out of uni just after he started this band and he went up and I went down for lots of reasons. It’s like a sibling love story of us dovetailing and coming back together and the pressures of where we gauge our success to be, the feelings of personal failure, everything it felt to have a little brother that overtook you to superstardom and the way that these young boys were held up and lauded by middle-aged music execs and stalked by celebrity cougars.
“It was a fairly insane moment in time and throughout all of that I was having my own crumble. I was in the middle of these iconic figures and moments and instead of embracing it and thinking ‘I’m at the centre of the universe’, I felt I didn’t belong here and was breaking inside. And then I go off to rehab. It’s quite candid and confessional.” But in a funny way, and with songs.
Director Bryony Shanahan is in full agreement. “This one bares its heart clearly,” she says. “The writing voice is very warm and funny so it leapt off the page. It struck me that the story is both incredibly relatable and totally extraordinary all at once. We all go through a coming of age where we’re trying to work out who we are and there’s probably a bumpy path anyway but for you to go through that in the pressure cooker that unfolded with your brother creates a pretty extraordinary experience.”
Growing up, it was Lucie and Carl versus the rest of the world. Their parents split - hence the wildly contrasting joint custody existence - then found new partners and had more kids. “So our attachments were to each other rather than to a parent,” says Barât. “We would fight as kids but we were also mates. Then I left home and thought ‘I’m my own person’ and he would just turn up to my work and I’d be like ‘this is so embarrassing’. We were either absolutely inseparable or just taking it out on each other because the only people that could understand this confusing environment we’d been in was each other.”
As the older sister, Barât was the first to jump, attending drama school in the late 1990s, graduating and promptly making her way to the Edinburgh Fringe with her freshly formed theatre company. “I loved that but it doesn’t f***ing pay,” she laments. There were less liberating experiences along the way which poisoned the acting well for Barât. In the following years, she wrote and performed poetry, formed a publishing company and attempted to follow her brother into music but found it to be “an impenetrable period for any woman. You were either viewed as a groupie or disregarded. I remember the boys when they were signed being swept up by what seemed to me to be middle aged men using them as an excuse to do shitloads of coke and living through these skinny boys with unwashed hair. I’m trying to do what you’re doing so why do I have to go and work in Pizza Hut but you’re getting a private jet?”
For a number of years, The Libertines were the toast of London, fronted by two likely lads tearing it up in ever ascending and then descending circles. Carl’s equally charismatic co-frontman Peter Doherty was a one man rock’n’roll soap opera and tabloid target for his relationship with supermodel Kate Moss and the rather less glamorous matter of his spiraling addictions and their impact on band relations. Throughout this period, the Barât siblings were flatmates in London, only compounding the disparity in their fortunes.
“We were quite geeky,” she recalls. “We used to get a jalfrezi and four cans of Stella and sat watching Pearl Harbor. I was almost mother to him but then they got signed, and he started coming home with insane amounts of cash. We were good friends essentially getting wrecked together going to afterparties.”
She is at pains to point out that their sibling rivalry has long been put to bed in favour of stable family domesticity but admits that “we did butt up a bit when Carl and Pete were having their thing, I’d charge at Pete on Carl’s behalf so it got a bit messy. Then he was off doing his own thing and I had to sort myself out.”
Sorting herself out included kicking her addiction to slimming pills and coming out. Both took several attempts, with the tipping point portrayed in the show. Barât’s own music is also used as a conduit for her emotions. Some of her songs - including co-writes with Carl and Pete - will be performed live, while some were pre-recorded at The Libertines’ Albion Rooms studio in Margate. There may even be some recorded cameos, but as Shanahan points out to Barât, “it isn’t a story about The Libertines or Carl. It’s a story about you and they are the support act.”
Standing in the Shadows of Giants is at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, various times, 31 July until 24 August.
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